Michele Ragusa plays Joanne, a travel agent among other characters, in “Craving For Travel.” (Photo by Joan Marcus)

There are plenty of laughs for everyone in Craving For Travel, the delightful comedy at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater on New York’s Theater Row, but travel agents will take special delight in the savvy inside jokes that lay bare the hidden aspects of the profession.

Co-writers Greg Edwards and Andy Sandberg (Sandberg also directed) have no apparent background in the travel industry, but they’ve done their homework well. They present us with Joanne and Gary, two high-powered luxury travel agents, formerly married, who are engaged in a bitter struggle to be named Travel Agent of the Year. Both are blessed (or perhaps cursed) with rosters of vastly wealthy clients who are insanely demanding as only the one percent can be.

I’m developing a new rule of thumb: If it’s been on “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” fuhggedaboudit!

Spurred by Guy Fieri’s raptures about cheeseburger soup, I dragged the beautiful and mysterious woman I travel with to East Amherst, New York’s Grover’s Bar and Grill.

Part of the mystique of Grover’s is that in a previous life the modest shingled building that houses the joint served as a hunting lodge for President Grover Cleveland. Nowadays, he’d be reduced to hunting for bargains at one of the many malls that line the route to Grover’s.

We arrived to find the place mobbed with eager diners, many of whom had spilled onto the pavement outside, drinks in hand. After negotiating an absolutely baffling chalk board sign up system and grabbing a cold brew, we repaired outside where we determined from departing guests that they had run out of cheeseburger soup. Damn you, Guy Fieri![Read more…]